External Hard Drives

Well, I am starting the new year the same way I did last year- with a hard drive failure. Last year my WD My Book Essential crashed a bit unexpectedly. Western Digital replaced the drive. A couple of weeks ago, it starting going bad again. I have been trying to upload as much as possible to create a backup but still, I will lose over 1 TB of scraps- all purchased this year. I had not been backing up as I go because as I understand, the backup services delete files once they are deleted from your computer. Completely getting rid of the drive would be the same as deleting the files right?

Sigh....

So, I will not buy Western Digital drives again (I have 2 Seagate drives that are older and have had no problems). Thought I would share this experience so others can hopefully avoid my mistakes...

I had the same troubles with my WD HD too. I never recovered the items off of it. I am still sick every time I think about it. I use Passport & Seagate now. So far so good. Anyone use Passport before?
I'm sorry about yours having trouble. That's alway sickening.
Hugs

Wow, sorry to hear this, I've been through some of the heartache of losing those external drives as well, even the WD HD...but HAVE A SUGGESTION!!!!!

We had a friend help us with a crashed hard drive on our desktop computer once and so I also sent one of the WD HD drives that had "crashed" over to him at the same time. He was able to access the drive for us, and loaded the info to a new hard drive that he put in the computer.

BUT this year, I thought I lost it again, and after having troubles with my scanner having no power...my dad talked me through finding a power source for the scanner that ran on the same volts. We found one amongest our many drives something that worked and in so doing, I ended up trying a new power source for the "crashed" WD external drive, and it worked! I never thought to try another source of power before for 2 reasons,
1) We ALWAYS SAW the LIGHT on the WD drive, and
2) because I didn't want to overwhelm the drive to with the wrong Volts. You just need to be sure that the output is the same V / A (Volts and Amps, if I remember correctly)

I had the same problem a few years back with a WD HD... I actually own (2) 1 TB EHD's by TOSHIBA... They are very compact... and I've had NO problems with them. I've owned one over 2 years to replace the WD I use to have and just bought the other about 6 months ago because I have been so impressed with the other one. Personally I think the larger drive you get "right now" the more likely it will be to crash on you. UNTIL they perfect it, I refuse to buy anything larger than a 1.5TB but I still bought a 1TB because the price difference wasn't worth the risk of it crashing to me. This is all based on my hubby's opinion as a systems administrator and computer guy for 19+ years. So, I'd rather have several 1 TB's vs one 3TB... any who... good luck withyour next purchase. so sorry you've had soooo many troubles. I know it can be soooo frustrating especially when it's paid kits or photos and not freebies.

I'm with Shawna - I own a 1TB Toshiba, and two 1TB Clickfree drives. I also have a WD drive, but I use it as a paperweight.

So far, Toshiba and Clikfree have been reliable. I don't let them go too long being the "Main Backup" - I do replace them every year, and then use the older ones for carrying files when I travel or any location other than home. I had a PC hard drive failure once, and was ever so glad that I had files backed up on a regular basis. Nowadays you can even back up to an online system such as Carbonite, or the "Cloud", but the expense is a little intimidating.

So sorry to hear about your HD failure, I sure hope it all works out and you are able to recover your files!

Uh-oh -- I just bought a WD My Passport a couple of months ago. No troubles so far, but I think I will investigate other backup HDs. I moved all my photos and scrapbooking onto the WD and would be sick if it crashed!

Just a hint about burned dvds and cds is that the lifetime on them is limited... So it's now just scratches etc that will "kill them"...

A good way of making sure not to loose anything is to have everything on 2 different harddrives One inside the computer and one outside (extrernal). If one of them crashes you can replace it and yet not loose anything

@Jenn: To me long term it's cheaper and more efficient to do what Jessica says. I have just purchased (4) 1 TB HDs (2) I use and (2) are exact copies of those two so if one ever crashes I haven't lost hardly anything. Depending on how much work I do or kits I download and unzip, organize, etc. I usually back-up monthly unless I've done a lot of work then I go ahead and copy(Ghost) it earlier right after I've done most of the work. Your backup HD's won't get as much wear and tear since you're not using them everyday. NOTE I also send them to work with the hubby. This way God forbid our house was broken into and computers or laptops stolen at least we still have most of our info safe at his work. You could leave them in a safety deposit work if neither of you works out of the home.

I have an external hard drive but we also pay for a Backblaze subscription, just in case. I pay them each year and if something does happen to my external hard drive then I am able to get my files back from them (either by downloading everything or they will send and external with all my stuff on for me to copy). The initial back up took a long time (lots of files ) but now it continuously backs my stuff up (it works when I am not using the computer - like when I am asleep).

What I'd like to do is have external hard drives that hold stuff which is not on my computer (like my gajillions of scrap stuff) and then I would like to back up those drives online. I have a laptop, not a desktop, so the EDs would not always be plugged in to my computer. Does anyone have this same system or know how online backup works in this situation? I guess whenever I add stuff from my laptop to the ED I could also take that opportunity to back up the ED with whatever online backup I decide to go with?

Any recommendations for online backup? Thanks for the Backblaze rec, Kaleena, I will check them out.

In some ways the freebies are the most heartbreaking. Almost all of the stores I have contacted were willing to reset links for me for free. In some cases, the links did not even need to be reset. Sugarhillco, Scrapbook-Bytes and ScrapMatters all keep links active so the only things I lost there were products no longer in the store. But the freebies... including all those December daily downloads we all collected.... *sigh*

The worst thing has been trying to track down Holiday Hoopla from MSA. I had to contact each contributor and in the case of 1 store, they redistributed the mini's to the designers...

I am looking into Backblaze. I work at Office Depot so I was lucky. I got a Seagate GoFlex Home 3 TB for $124 with price matching (to Amazon), a $25 coupon, and my discount. As a hard drive it is fine but wow there are lots of foibles if you try to do anything fancy with it. It is supposed to be accessible remotely but when I set that up, I lost local access. I had to mess with my router settings (boy was that educational) and setup port forwarding and so on.... now I am just using it as a hard drive! I have been downloading like mad this week and looks like next week too so I need a back up started very soon!

I don't have an external drive right now because they kept failing on me. I'm using Crashplan (crashplan.com) right now. It's an online backup, but it DOES keep your deleted files, unless you tell it otherwise. It's a little complicated to figure out all the settings, but I've had to restore things twice now, and it has worked perfectly. I do want an EHD, just can't find one I'm comfortable with.

So I have a 3T WD My Book Essential which is for all my scrapping stuff. It is my second one only because I dropped the first one and it died instantly. I have Carbonite as my off site backup. It allows me to backup my hard drive but also I pay extra to be able to backup one EHD with no limit. So it backs up my 1T hard drive and my 3T EHD. Since I started scrapping Carbonite has yet to get it all backed up. I download my zip files first to a monthly file. Then I unzip and save my sorted file to my EHD. Before I delete the zip files from my hard drive I burn them to DVDs as it is estimated that the DVDs have a 100 yr life span. Trust me, when I crashed my first 3T EHD those DVD backups were pricesless. Of course, I had to unzip and re-sort all the files but at least I had them! Once I get caught up on my sorting of files I will burn the sorted files to disc so that if I lose them again I don't have to go through the unzipping and sorting of the scrapbook kits!

Thanks for the tips though as when I have to get another EHD I will probably go with something other than WD.

Carbonite works well as when I got a new laptop it was easy to load what I had on my previous laptop! The only drawback is that in the scrapbooking world the files are pretty big and it does take a lot of time to get them all backed up. That could be a sign that I need to stop acquiring, LOL!

@Marcia I have had Carbonite for a couple of years now. I started with the backup on my computer and then when they added the capability of adding backup to one EHD I upgraded - worked perfectly, they credited me for the time remaining on the contract and charged me the upgrade price. Very fair. I do have to say that I opted for the multi year option which brought the annual cost down. I know that my radio Tech Guy guru swears by Carbonite. Again, with scrapping and the size of the downloads I do have to say that it is "slow" at getting everything backed up. I no longer leave my computer on at night but usually have it up and running for the entire day. I do currently have multiple copies of my kits as I am sorting them but once I get them organized burn the zips to DVD and delete the extra files. I just checked and I have 306,298 (208 GB) already backed up and pending are 302042 (633 GB). I think the remaining is so high because of the extra files in zipped downloads. I have a laptop with 1T HD and a 3T EHD. You definitely have to be patient. I do have to say that when I upgraded to my current laptop it was really easy to change the computer and upload the Carbonite backed up files! I did have to call the tech department for help just because I wanted to make sure I understood how to do it. The tech department is amazing!